Chicago director finds inspiration at Dominick's

After spending years hanging around sets watching other directors bring his words to life, screenwriter Steve Conrad says he now knows one thing he won't do as a director.

He'll never, he says, put his name in boldface with the words "a film by" preceding it before the start of one of his feature films.

Yes, it's career-affirming. But after shooting "The Promotion," his directorial debut that opens Friday, Conrad says he wouldn't feel right giving himself that kind of credit.

"I used to think, 'Oh, that's cool!' Then I actually made a movie, and I realized that there's no such thing as 'a film by.' It's not like a novel. It's not written by one guy," says Conrad, who lives on the North Side with his wife and children.

Originally from South Florida, Conrad came to the Chicago area as a student, studying English at Northwestern University. Not too long after he graduated, he sold his screenplay, "Wrestling Ernest Hemingway," which was made into a film in 1993 and featured Robert Duvall, Shirley MacLaine and Sandra Bullock.

Since then, his work has centered around, well, work. He has had two fairly recent successes as a screenwriter with "The Pursuit of Happyness," starring Will Smith, and "The Weather Man," starring Nicolas Cage, which helped pave the way for directing his first feature film.

"The Promotion," which stars Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly, falls in line with the type of work for which Conrad is known, stories that deal with the idea of believable people -- in this case, an assistant manager at a grocery chain -- working to make their lives better. It's his way of honoring the little everyday successes that occur in day-to-day life. Conrad has been inspired by Chicago's fast-paced work environment and has set many of his original screenplays in workplaces.

"My considerations [before I came to Chicago] were limited to writing about breakups or parents who don't understand. Very selfish, teenaged writing," Conrad says. "Then I ... had to be a grown-up here in a city that works very hard and at a very fast pace."

Inspiration hits Conrad in wild ways. For this film, it came about five years ago when he was in a Dominick's parking lot.

"It just so happened it was some teenage kids ... were yelling insults at each other and playing the dozens, but really loud and with really colorful language," Conrad says. "I noticed this kid on the other side of the parking lot who was dressed in the store uniform and had this yellow vest on that said 'courtesy patrol' ...

"I thought, wow, he's an assistant manager here, and his job is to ask these guys to leave. I watched him walk over there, and he was walking so slowly, and I knew it wasn't going to turn out well if he went over there. But I also thought it might be funny."

Not surprisingly, the kids mocked the grocery store worker. But the kicker, Conrad says, came when he walked away from the group.

"He turned around to go back to work, and on the back of his little yellow vest it said, 'Have a nice day!' I thought, 'Could I do that?,' " Conrad says. " ... It's heroic to do that every day."